My wife, my two sons and I live in the middle of farming country - lots of fruit trees and hay fields. It’s very beautiful, and while I would rather live in a big city, country life does have it’s perks. I can stand in the front yard and take a whiz and nobody can see me. I can crank up the Stevie Ray Vaughn until the windows shake and my ears bleed and nobody can stop me. I can change the oil in the driveway and nobody cares.
Problem is my worthless, hillbilly piece-of-shit neighbors. The property is a flophouse, with at least two generations living there along with several friends of the family and numerous loud dogs. Despite being employed and holding down good-paying jobs, the whole lot decided a couple of years ago to go into the pot growing business. So now they have a large field behind their house full of these nasty shurbs. There is nearly constant flow of traffic to and from the house (they have happily told me they sell pills on the side), and lots of noise at night. The younger son is violent, with a history of assault and has threatened me more than once, both times because he didn’t like the way I landscaped my yard.
My wife and I have been talking about moving for years, but it’s come down to the fact we have no choice. Our neighbors are too fucking crazy, and I worry about my kids. Trouble is we don’t have the money to do so. The rent on this place is dirt cheap because the owners don’t want to sell it at a loss so have asked us to basically be caretakers until the market rebounds enough that they can make a profit. So I have to find a cheap house, which isn’t easy, and likely use student loan money to pay for the move. I hate moving. My kids like their house. I like my house. But I refuse to live next to a bunch of psychotic drug dealers any longer. The next two or three months will be extremely stressful.
I also found out recently that a cousin of mine is a total wing nut: every extreme right wing conspiracy theory that’s out there, he believes every word. He’s a birther. Obama is a commie secretly bent on destroying the county and selling it North Korea. John Robers should be tried for treason. Hannity and Breitbart are (or was) pillars of society and the only trustworthy people in the news. Gays should be stripped of all civil liberties. Islam should be outlawed, practitioners should be exiled from the country and Christianity forced on all U.S. citizens.
This sucks because he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. Caring and compassionate, always polite. However, once the Republican primaries started heating up, he began littering his FB wall with extremely fanatical right-wing garbage. Quite sad.
Rant away!
I, too, have some very sweet-seeming family members who hold odious beliefs on politics and religion (they’re southern Baptist teabaggers).
My family got along much better before we had the ability to air such bitchery on Facebook. I miss those days. It was fun to get along mostly and just ostracize the one crazy uncle (he’s a hardcore conspiracy theorist). Now we can’t even do that because of factioning.
I have to ask. Have you reported them to the police? An operation that large should certainly get their interest, and it might get Mr. Violent away from you and your family.
Our library is air conditioned. It has more books than I could read in a lifetime. It sounds like a GREAT place to be on a brutally hot day. Is yours not AC’d?
I can’t even blame Facebook…a few weeks ago, some favorite cousins stopped by for a visit. It was very nice, until they started talking about a younger cousin who wants to become a teacher in an impoverished urban area. “She just wants to help them little black kids. It’s because she watches too much TV.”
When I state the following in an E-mail: “I don’t respond well to hard-sell techniques. Please, do not contact me any further, by E-mail or phone; in fact, there is no need to respond to this message”, that does not mean: “Please send me a lengthy E-mail demanding to know what you’ve done to offend me, then by all means follow that up an hour later with a phone call, and when I hang up on you, follow up with yet another E-mail accusing me of rudeness and of lying (to whom exactly, and about what?)”.
I would wonder in passing why on earth you’d be so personally invested in trying to sell me goods I don’t want when you have repeatedly claimed to not even work for the company you are shilling for, but then I realize: you’re insane, and that’s all the explanation necessary. Now piss off forever.
I expect to be pounced on by one of my cousins on Facebook. She insists that Obama’s healthcare proposal is going to slash Social Security checks. I disagreed. That’s all it takes.
She reminds me of Chicken Little: The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Anything/everything that comes up is for sure going to have the most absolutely awful consequences ever. She warns us all, she demands boycotts, and she sends slews of emails that always seem to include the flag, Jesus Christ and a tear.
If things were as dire as she thinks they are we would all already be dead from the stress.
While I was in Tennessee, I spent an afternoon taking publicity pics for Flutewiz’s band. Yesterday, he informs me they have are going to kick one of the guys out of the band, so the pictures will have to be retaken.
That’s fine and all the excuse I need for another trip to Tennessee. However, trying to take pictures of these guys is like herding cats. I have a great shot lined up, shoot it, and discover when I download it that Flutewiz is doing the “oh look a squirrel”.
No. I thought long and hard about it, and probably would have after the son got in my face about my lawn being too long if my kids had been home to see it. I decided against it because, frankly, they’re drug dealers. They have a lot of “customers”, and I have no desire to piss them off, which I suspect is what would happen if their supplier/grower got thrown in the pokey for assault. I figure at this point it’s best to just walk away. I’m not looking forward to it. We’ll have to downsize; this house is three times what we would normally be able to afford and have filled it up. There will be lots arguing over what to keep and what to throw away, and many trips to the dump. Gaaa! I had hoped to spend the summer camping and backpacking with my boys, but that may not happen now.
Fucking drug dealers. How in hell can one little plant make otherwise normal people act so fucking crazy?! I knew these people before they started growing weed (their son is a pothead, and brought it, along with the growing plan, when he moved in with them), and they were normal if a bit eccentric. Now they’re just nuts. They act almost psychotic, and the whole bunch has become deeply paranoid about, well, everything. We live in the country, remember? So when the dogs, which are left to just run around all day and night, start barking at a deer or something what’s their response? Start walking around the property, usually in the dark, with a loaded shotgun because “someone might be interested in their garden”. The Law of Parsimony is lost on these morons.
Damn blender just crapped out on me in the middle of making frozen margaritas. :mad: I thought this was supposed to be a good brand! The only use it ever sees is during the summer; I expected more than 5 years of service out of the thing.
Spike, dear sweet brain-damaged kitty. I know its hot in the outside room. You have a perfectly good kitty door so you can use to come inside whenever you want. I know that you forget about it and will wait for me to open the big door for you, so I check on you often.
Please stop sleeping with your head in the water bowl. It scares your slave so much that she runs out to grab you and see if you are still alive. Also, please stop getting offended when I snatch you up while you are having a nice nap because I think you are going to drown yourself.
If this doesn’t stop, I’ll close the kitty door and laugh myself silly everytime you want to go out and mash your face against the door. (He can remember how to get out, getting back in is a totally different story.)
I wish the people who decide these things (PWDTT) would stop having somebody sing “God Bless America” during the seventh inning of baseball games. For one thing, they’ve replaced a perfectly good song (“Take me out to the ball game”) with this drivel. For another, a whole lot of people at the Rangers game seem to think it’s the national anthem and put their hands over their hearts. The PWDTT encourage this by asking people to “rise to honor America”. Come on, people. We have an anthem; this is not it. Let’s go back to singing “take me out to the ball game”; I enjoy the faint air of ridiculousness involved in singing a request to be taken someplace you already are. Let’s leave the blessing of America out of it. We have one song for amateur singers to butcher before the game begins; they don’t need another opportunity. (We won’t even go into the matter of bringing Og to the ballgame, or the matter of “singers” who slow the song down to make their moment last…)
You may have a point there. If God was actually present at half the major League ballparks in use on any given summer’s day, there’d be a heap of smiting going on when He got a load of those guys who take a turn at bat several times without ever taking the field.
Hey, gee, you weren’t by chance visiting the Coventry Farmers Market in Coventry, CT, were you? Besides the overgrown assloads of crowds and their shitting dogs all over the place, the random out in the middle of nowhere roundabout is kind of a high point. And when I say “high point”, I mean “total deal breaker, I’ll never go to that crazy-ass vegetable mess again.”
Geez. I was smart enough to replace my Verizon phone and extend my contract in time to keep my unlimited data plan. I had the foresight to look at phones on the website before going to the Verizon store - the phone I thought I wanted was on sale on line, so I just played with it in the store to be certain it suited my needs, then came home and ordered it (60% discount and free shipping. Go me!!) I was even bright enough to bypass Verizon’s misleading website activation, which tried to insist that unlimited data was incompatible with my device, but a 1 or 2 gig plan would work. But I wasn’t smart enough to order a case - I figured I’d just go buy one tomorrow.
Anyone want to guess who just dropped her 2-day-old phone and broke the screen?
